C.E. Mutphy - Hands of Flame

A moment later she went bounding down the mountainside, feet light in her running shoes, hair flying into her face as she bounced from one smooth rock face to another. Stone turned to trees to dart around, long strides eating up the ground, and trees became meadow as Margrit stretched and laughed and ran more freely than she’d done in weeks.

She came upon the river with no warning, and with even less thought dove into it, gasping with shock both at her choice and the cold as a current swept her downstream. It pulled her deeper than she thought a river should go, the surface growing darker and farther away even as she struggled to reach it again. Panic seemed curiously missing as her lungs began to ache, as if a part of her mind disbelieved what was happening, and refused to accept she needed air within memory’s confines.

A shape came out of the water, lithe and quick and swimming against the current as though it hardly existed. Human hands caught her, a humanoid face coming close to hers. Masculine, she thought, though with peculiarly large, double-lidded eyes that blinked rapidly at her in the gloom. Not so dark she couldn’t see, though after a few seconds she began to think the creature who’d caught her glowed with his own bioluminescence, a waft of electric blue in the dark.

He lifted his hands to her face, drawing her closer still, then tipped his head and, without invitation, covered her mouth with his own. Margrit squeaked a protest in the back of her throat, so surprised she could do nothing else before agony ripped over her.

Memory seared her, changing her concept of herself from a human creature to something born of the sea. When she dragged in a breath, cold water flooded her ribs and throat, and when she gawked at herself in horror, it was to discover tremendous gills lining her torso. Her vision had cleared, leaving her able to see that her rescuer did glow, and that his hair was the same electric color as the aura he gave off. Like her changed self-perception, he too had gilled ribs, and now that she could see more clearly, fluttering gills at his throat, as well. His eyes were enormous, and his hands less human than she’d believed, with webbing between the fingers.

A grin split her face so widely it hurt as she backed up to look at the rest of him. Despite the gills, he looked mammalian in form: the heavy, brilliantly colored tail had no scales, only soft-looking hide like a whale’s, and horizontal fins at the end, more like a dolphin than a fish.

A trill of laughter escaped her throat and she tried for words, uncertain if she could make them underwater. “I get mermaid memories? Really? That’s so cool.”

“I am only your guide.” The mermaid—merman—siryn, Margrit settled on, remembering the Old Races’ name for the undersea peoples, and feeling absurd using merman, which seemed even more made-up than mermaid. The siryn’s voice was musical, catching Margrit by the heart and tugging her whether she wanted to follow or not.

Alarm spiked through her, abrupt recollection of the siryns’ reputation. Margrit backpedaled, only realizing as she did so that she, too, wore a mermaid’s tail, hers of rich coppery brown, like an impossibly vibrant shade of her own cafe-latte skin. “You’re not going to drag me off and drown me, are you?”

A few powerful strokes of her benefactor’s flukes sent him around her in quick, irritated circles. “Would I have given you the memory of how to breathe and swim beneath the water if I intended to drown you? I am your guide, not your doom.” Even in pique he sounded like rainfall on crystal, voice shimmering with beautiful offerings. Challenge laid down, he flicked his tail a few times and surged away, leaving Margrit to follow or not, as she saw fit.

A mixture of wanting to apologize and sheer delight at the scenario sent her after him, her hair clouding around her when she caught up. Like the tail she’d been granted, it was more brilliant in color than she was accustomed to, though not as unearthly as her guide’s. “How are you giving me the memory? Can siryns do that, too?”

“No. This all takes place within the gargoyle histories. I utilize their ability to share memory in order to make you more comfortable. You could traverse this realm in your own form, if you so wished.”

“In other words, this is all happening in my mind.” Margrit drew another deep breath, feeling water flood her ribs, and smiled against the coldness. “Guess I might as well enjoy it. Where are we going?”

“Where does your heart tell you we are going?”

“To the heart of the world,” Margrit said promptly, then coughed on her own pomposity. “I don’t know why I said that.”

Laughter washed through the siryn’s voice, high notes on a piano rendered into something impossibly pure. “Because your heart told you to. Now, hush. We will not want to speak as the pressures grow stronger. The depths are not comfortable, even for our kind, and we need what air we can steal from the cold, black water.”

It wasn’t until she didn’t find it that Margrit realized she had truly expected to see Atlantis when her blue-haired guide finally drew to a halt, closer to the dark ocean floor than Margrit had ever imagined being. Instead of the fabled city, though, there was merely a rent in the earth, so broad and deep that both heat and light rose from it even in the icy depths. A primitive impulse to run—or swim—as fast as she could, as far as she could, set Margrit’s heartbeat racing until she felt dizzy from it. This was not a place humans were meant to be, and the sensation that a price would be paid for intruding weighed on her as heavily as the ocean pressure did. Hell had much in common with this stretch of barren undersea land. Even the juxtaposition of hot and cold promised to punish the wicked with one form of misery, then another.

When a serpent of impossible length and breadth slithered free of the torn earth, Margrit laughed, then shoved her hands against her mouth as though she could push the sound back in. There would be a serpent; of course there would be a serpent. She could hear the hysteria in the laugh she tried to swallow, and dared not follow her own thoughts too closely for fear of finding madness in them. She knotted her hands more tightly, and realized something cut into one palm.

A sea-serpent chess pawn floated a few centimeters away when Margrit opened it, caught in the current its make-sake created as it swam. The tremendous serpent circled her and her companion, watching them as it wound around time and time again. Its great length putting Janx’s dragon form to shame: it was as though it had been born at the beginning of time, and had grown slowly, constantly, ever since. It had too many, or too few, colors to name, all of them shimmering and changing as the creature made a whirlpool of itself around Margrit and her guide. They were turned in its vortex, unable to meet the monster’s eye with their own.

Its miniature representation floated away, just out of Margrit’s reach, insignificant beyond words in comparison to its model. The carving looked like the toy it was; the real serpent looked like a limbless dragon, broad-snouted with wide-set eyes, a Norse carving come to life.

“Oh.” Margrit’s voice cracked even on that single word. “Oroborus. My God.” She heard more fervency and devoutness in her near prayer than she’d ever heard in her life, and wondered what her mother, her father, her kindly priest at her church, would think of that. Her chest ached, delight borne from someplace so deep within her she had no idea where it began. It stole her breath, stole the form she’d been given and left her dangling in the water as a mere mortal, ordinary human. Warnings whispered that she should be frightened, she should be drowning, she should be crushed, she should be dead, and none of it, not one of those true and dire thoughts, could unman the consuming, heartbreaking joy that welled inside her.